Why Should I Upgrade My PC’s Hard Drive?
By Randall Deetz, on Mar 3, 2021
Probably the biggest complaint PC user’s have is the performance of their system. Why the heck is my PC running so darn slow? There’s numerous reasons why your PC might slow down, including too many startup apps running in the background, maybe your processor is overheating from poor ventilation from your fan, registry corruption can cause slower performance, even data fragmentation on your hard drive. Often, a good solution is to simply reboot. Many users often go days between reboots, which will clear out memory caches and gain back speed. Adding memory can also increase your PCs performance, most memory upgrades can now be done for under a hundred bucks. Another contributing factor to a slow PC is when your hard drive gets filled up. If you’re running numerous apps on your PC at the same time, your physical memory may run out. When this happens, virtual memory in the form of hard drive space gets used. If you hard drive’s storage is filled, no virtual memory will be available, and your PC will slow down to a crawl. This is another important reason why you may want to upgrade your hard drive.
When upgrading your PC’s hard drive, you’ll have two options… HDD or SSD, hard disk drive or solid state drive. Hard disk drives have rotating media, while solid state drives don’t have any moving parts. An HDD is recommended when increasing storage is your primary concern. Seagate’s IronWolf drive packs a whopping 18 terabytes. If your PC has 350 gigabytes of data, you could perform a full-system image backup to this drive every week for a year and still have space left over at the end of the year. For user’s who want to increase their PCs performance, SSD drives are recommended. You can currently buy an SSD with as much as 8 terabytes of storage. These drive are more expensive then HDDs, and performance can vary greatly from one manufacturer to another, and from product line to another.
Once you’ve decided on which drive type fits your needs, you next need to decide how to migrate your system to the new drive. When we say system, we mean your operating system, installed programs, and all your documents and data. There are numerous software solutions available designed to migrate from one drive to another. Sadly, most have complicated user interfaces, which seem like their designed more for an aero space engineer then the average user. Selecting the best solution will allow you to perform the upgrade yourself, which saves you from hauling your PC off to the local repair shop and paying someone else. Privacy can also be a concern as they may ask for your password, which will give them full access to all your documents and data.
For some, you might want to upgrade a system with a large amount data, such as pictures and videos, to smaller, faster SDD drive. Getting all your stuff to fit on the new SSD may pose a problem if you select the wrong migration software. Some solutions support excluding folders and files from the data transfer process, but if you select the wrong items, you can render the new drive non-bootable. Other solutions don’t support exclusions at all, and ask you to delete stuff before running the software.
This is where Rescue Drive SSD Upgrade software shines. Rescue Drive has an intelligent system for excluding data from the transfer process. Let’s take a look Rescue Drive’s exclusion process in action. If you attempt to migrate to a smaller, faster SSD, Rescue Drive will ask you to exclude items from the transfer process. When this occurs, the following screen is displayed in the UI.
In the Data Exclusion section, the totals are all color-coded and relate to the colored bars on the hard drive display below. When enough data is selected for exclusion, the colored bar is within the hard drive and the Next button becomes enabled.
Rescue Drive will also identify temporary folders, cache folders, plus page and hibernation files for exclusion. The recycle bin can also be excluded. Excluding this data alone is often enough to allow the transfer process to continue. When this is the case, all of your data is safely transferred to the new drive, and only stuff that isn’t needed is left out.
Clicking Advanced Folder & File Selection will allow access to yet more data to exclude.
Rescue Drive prevents you from excluding anything that would render your new drive as non-bootable. If you select to exclude everything that is available for exclusion, then you would only have the OS, your apps, and anything else required to boot your PC. No other hard drive migration software provides such a seamless, intelligent process for excluding data from the transfer process.
Rescue Drive supports the latest UEFI systems, legacy MBR systems, plus is unequaled in it’s support for migrating to a new hard drive in protected mode WinPE.
Best of All… Rescue Drive SSD Upgrade is FREE!!!
Very good advice and highlights the different approaches a user can take to providing system storage capacity. Seems like a choice between speed and space. On a number of my Windows devices I have switched to an SSD main drive but kept a high capacity HDD available, either internally or externally. Seems to get me the best of both worlds.
Thanks Gary! Check out the review of Rescue Drive with Macrium Reflect:
https://rescue-drive.com/transfer/
Both solutions are free, but Rescue Drive is much easier to use, and does a much better job of migrating to a smaller SSD.